By Dr Sanghamitra Desai Gadekar
This is a report of my first impressions as a doctor of the situation existing around the Rawatbhata reactors. Rawatbhata reactors is something of a misnomer. The reactors are situated on the lands of a village called Tamlao. Rawatbhata is where the colony of the workers is situated and is about 11 km from the plant site.
At Tamlao to escape the heat I took shelter in a small roadside shop and began talking to the people there. Some children were playing in the front yard.
At first sight they looked just like any other poor children of the region. But on closer observation I noticed that many of them seemed to have difficulty in movement. I called them over and examined them. Many of them had muscular weakness. Two had bone tumours. Just then I noticed that a shopkeeper across the road had a thyroid tumour and the shopkeeper next to him had a cyst on the cheek. An old man had a nearly two inch diameter cyst on the cheek.
I studied medicine in Calcutta. But even there I had never seen so many patients with tumours in a single day. On talking to these people in Tamlao, I found that almost all the symptoms had appeared after five or more years of the reactor's commissioning.
The next day we were in Rawatbhata and heard that a child had been born recently with talipice (crooked legs) in a colony of cattle herders. We went to see him. His mother told us that her next-door neighbour had a six-month-old baby boy with the same defect. When we went there, the lady said, "Oh, there is another seven-month-old girl just seven or eight houses away who too was born with crooked legs". Nearby in another colony we saw a two-year-old boy with the same problem and another two-year-old who had been born without any toes on both his legs.
Later we went to see Jharjhani village, about eight to nine kilometres from the plant in a direction opposite to Rawatbhata. The villagers claimed that at least 25 days a month the winds blew toward them from the plant.
There every one I met, and I met hundreds of people, complained of stomach pains. There was a girl born here without one ear and another two-year-old who did not have a hand since birth. Again there were a number of children with tumours. A very large number had polio. There were two orphan children with large lumps in the abdomen. Many women and men complained of sterility.
On talking to shepherds, I learnt that they have been seeing similar problems in their herds for a long time. One person told us, "You can go and check from Panchayat records that this village 10 years ago had 5000 goats and sheep but today there are hardly 500. I have had goats born with three legs by the dozen."
I have been studying the health effects of radiation for the last few years. Because of long-term ingestion of radionuclides, immune turbed, and therefore I was mentally prepared to see increased incidence of different diseases, some cancers and genetic defects. But even in my worst nightmares I could never have imagined that I would see so many in so short a time in such a small population.
I talked to the authorities of the nuclear power plant. They said that radioactive releases from the plant were so small — just half of 1% of the natural background — that it was inconceivable that these diseases and deformities were due to radioactive discharges. They were inclined to blame air pollution and adulteration in cooking oils for the problem. However, inquiries revealed that there are no factories or industrial establishments of any kind other than the nuclear power plant in the vicinity to cause air pollution.
The number of deformities and handicapped people around Rawatbhata is certainly abnormally large. I doubt that radiation in low doses can cause this much damage. There have been no reports of such teratogenic effects in the vicinity of other operating nuclear plants anywhere else in the world, although there have been some newspaper reports indicating such effects around Chernobyl.
Therefore, I suspect that "routine emissions" from Rawatbhata have been much larger than admitted by the authorities. Or there have been accidents and "leaks" during its 17-year history that the authorities have managed to hide. Whatever the cause, it is imperative that there be an immediate scientific investigation of the entire area.
Even if there are no baseline health data for comparison, and it is criminally negligent on the part of the atomic authorities to have polluted the environment without having first collected baseline data, they and the government should immediately do comparison studies with areas without nuclear contamination and publish their findings. It is also necessary for independent scientists to conduct their own investigations.
We are building new reactors in Gujarat, Karnataka, Tamilnadu, Andhra Pradesh and other places. Will the same scenes be repeated in all these places a few years after the reactors begin operation?
If we want to save our land from this hell which goes on generation after generation, the time for action is before these plants begin operation. I urge doctors, scientists and social workers living in the vicinity of proposed plant sites to beware of this terrible danger.
[Abridged from the Indian magazine Anumukti.]